This report is a study that evaluated self-driving cars and seeks to understand how likely are people to use automated vehicles, what the factors are that influence acceptance and intent to use, what the appeal is of self-driving vehicles, what changes in travel behavior would exist because of having access to self-driving cars and how these may impact traffic and congestion patterns. Using the Austin, Texas area as their study territory, results showed it is difficult to predict intent to use because these vehicles are currently not commercially available. Additionally, although the respondents were aware of automated vehicles, they were not very knowledgeable about them.

— Texas A&M Transportation Institute, January 2015

“Researchers and policy makers are looking for specific impacts on travel behavior, but it is difficult for early research to identify them because the general public is not yet familiar with the new opportunities (or challenges) self-driving vehicles may bring, such as intra-household car sharing, new types of car-sharing fleets, or the challenges of mixed fleets on the road” (pg 38).

— Texas A&M Transportation Institute, January 2015

Report 2: Research for TranCommittee-Self-Piloted Cars: The Future of Road Transport, January 2015

This report discusses the automated vehicle market in Europe specifically. There is a lengthy table discussed examples of applications of automated vehciles in private cars by car manufacturer. For example, in 2015, Tesla released a software update, which is essentially an extensive of Level 1 Driver Assistance. Audi was the first car company to test a fully automated vehicle. Toyota is developing a modifed Lexus GS with technology to drive autonomously on highways. Other car manufacturer plans for automated vehicles are incuded in this report.

There is also discussion about start-up companies in this sector such as Faraday Future who is developing applications of self-driving cars. Other non-car manufacturer developments include Google, Apple, Robot Taxi, Zoox, and Vislab. Then there are the applicatiosns of automation in freight vehicles such as EcoTwins and Companion that are studying the application of platooning in daily transport operations.

Report 3: Smart cars: who has the head start?, June 2015

This report discusses in more detail the actual components of the automated vehicle technology including adaptive headlamp control, radar, ulytrasonic sensors, forward-looking camera, rear-vision camera, surround view camera, night vision, Lidar, artificial intelligence, multiple redundancies, self-healing systems and more. There is also a chart breakdown of these technlogies and how they are integrated into different levels of automation such as semi-automated and fully automated. For more detail, there is a chart that shows the major manufactuers of the technology components such as Bosch, Continental, Denso, Delphi, TRW and more.

I hope you find this useful, and can see that there is a lot of useful information available through the portal about the automotive industry. If you have any additional needs or questions about our reports, please feel free to contact us.